a¬ Btw Tim Swanson published a book on BTC, pretty grim tbh. ofnumbers.com/the-anatomy/MP What does he know.

a¬ Well, actually he is not stupid.MP "Environment scholar" ? Gimme a break.i

a¬ And no obvious affiliations to USG.MP Srsly ? Academic in nonsubject living in San Francisco ? How obvious does it have to get ? Douche with no b-a exposure writing "a book" about Bitcoin ? I mean come on.

a¬ So he is nobody, but this does not automatically means that all he says is rubbish.MP How does your logic go there ? Meaning can't exist without context. Being a nobody means he has no context. Ergo, everything he says is meaningless.

a¬ Well, mining centralisation is a real threat.MP Not as he imagines / misrepresents it.ii Let me work an analogy here : any 1kb string is just as much a string as any other 1kb string. If your definition is based on the entropy contained, then they statistically are equivalent. Now, if someone has my key, that someone can write a 1kb string which decrypts to something. If he does not have the key, there is simply no way for the stuff he puts in the 1kb string to decrypt to anything. That is the whole story : he's a generator of random strings, 1kb at a time. The value of these is epsilon. You could have some fun mining them for entropyiii, which in practice works out to being made fun of on Trilema or w/e. But as far as the meaning goes, they're spaded. It's not that they do or don't mean. It's that they can't mean.

a¬ Power is not equal to observation skills.MP I don't follow.

a¬ He can't decide on anything, but it does not automatically means that all his data is wrong.MP But it does, for he has no data. There's no such thing as "data" per se. There may exist measurements. If you measured wrongiv... they're useless. Randomly measured numbers aren't data, they're the random string above. To be data, they have to be part of a specific context. See this, the part where he says that unless it's done on one of the 3 tools, it will be ignored. The reason for that is, without the proper context there is no data.

a¬ Right, authority.MP Well, not even. More like control. How do you know he didn't mix chewing gum in there ? Outside of chain of custody, there is no such thing as judicial proof. This isn't a peculiarity of the legal thinking system. This is sanity. Outside of chain of context, there is no such thing as data, or meaning.

a¬ Well, amount of active hashpower is observable without any special instruments. Amount of blockchain tx per sec, is also publicMP True. That much is so to speak common ground, and it is a great advance brought about by Bitcoin, that such a thing exists. Otherwise, what is the USD M3 ? But you will notice that for this very reason it also is not HIS data.

a¬ Ok, price of electricity, price of hardware, mostly public and verifiable as well.MP To some degree, which is where the fun starts. Let's get back to the earlier prepaid anon credit cards. Do they exist or don't they ?v There is a lot of softness involved suddenly. People make the wrong judgment on the basis of the impression of data whose firmness they misjudge. This is how toddlers fall, past about the age of 3 : they see a picture of their surroundings, do not understand the dynamic equilibriums involved, step on a ladder fall over. Which takes us right back to the issue of the meaning of said "data".

a¬ Dynamic equilibrium observation is probabilistic, and hence it's possible to get variety of conclusions.MP Most of which will be wrong, as the observation is probabilistic, but the actual evolution is as close to deterministic as it gets.

a¬ Of course.

———

Yes, seriously, there is no such thing. I see that, I read "homeopathic phrenology". Because that's what it is.

Later update : Turns out I was thinking of the wrong man. Our guy is not the "American economics scholar specializing in environmental governance", but some other Swanson with a TEFL/TKT cert. [↩]

I have no clue as to how specifically he misrepresents it, nor do I care. Because it does not matter, that level of specificity, not unless he's paying for the service.

The boneheaded teenaged male approach to learning, "let me tell you some stupid shit that I came up with and you tell me specifically where it's wrong and why" only works with people that give a shit about you personally, which is usually a set so narrow it doesn't even include your own parents (which is why they don't spend their entire waking hours arguing with you on your own terms, as you'd want and expect them to). Unless you are very rich and don't actually need it, this approach to learning isn't for you.

Yes I know it'd be your choice, if you had a choice. You do not have a choice. Start learning like girls before you have to be fucked like a girl. [↩]

Not specifically for the brute entropy, mind you. Usually it works by examining patterned, predictable failures of entropy. Ie, what decontextualized peons call "logic". [↩]

Oh how many countless ways there are to measure wrong. Or to not understand what you've measured. [↩]

Yet another random twerp with delusions of ceoism who was going to make yet another Bitcoin service which depends on some mostly dead banking thing. Which dead thing nevertheless "exists", in any sense of existence that doesn't include anything major being based on it, and which existence will go away the moment you grow big enough to actually make money. Like MtGox's bank accounts and so on and so forth. There are so many of these popping up on a daily basis it becomes impossible to even keep track. [↩]

[...] Taking it up a notch is Mircea Popescu. Popescu is the founder of MPEx which IPO’d SatoshiDice and was subsequently sued by the SEC (SatoshiDice settled with the SEC several months ago). Later Popescu violently threatened Andreas Antonopolous on Twitter and was kicked off the microblogging platform for violating the terms of service. Today a friend pointed to a new post by Popescu which takes aim at me (not my book): “No, you don’t have something to say on the topic.” [...]

[...] Taking it up a notch is Mircea Popescu. Popescu is the founder of MPEx which IPO’d SatoshiDice and was subsequently sued by the SEC (SatoshiDice settled with the SEC several months ago). Later Popescu violently threatened Andreas Antonopolous on Twitter and was kicked off the microblogging platform for violating the terms of service. Today a friend pointed to a new post by Popescu which takes aim at me (not my book): “No, you don’t have something to say on the topic.” [...]

[...] meaningful” strings in some other random, irrelevant space (and this neatly folds into why Tim has absolutely nothing to say on the topic of Bitcoin, incidentally). So now… does that make me “a cult leader” [...]

[...] full stop". And no, promises to pay from Josh Garza are not Bitcoin. And no, the "opinions" of Tim Swanson are NOT opinions. Because no WoT. And so fucking on. The source matters first and foremost. Just [...]

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